The concept of "domesticating" potential terrorists may seem simplistic to critics, but Thayer points out that the Palestinian Liberation Organization served as a matchmaker to successfully fight growth of the rival group Black September, an offshoot of PLO that was infamous for killing Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich.

To Venuti, the act of creating a transparent translation is a "domesticating" act, in that you scrub out foreign elements, strange wording, different terms, any ambiguities that could confuse the reader, and so on, so that all that remains of the text are things that are familiar for the reader.

Over time, political, social and economic forces have brought us to a place where the working class (and to a surprising degree, the middle class) gets domesticating education and functional literacy, and the rich get empower education and powerful literacy.

The orchards, Mr. Means says, were "a source of food and drink, and a sign and promise of permanency"—to settlers, that is, not the wandering Chapman, who seemed to take off whenever civilization raised its domesticating head.